A rose is a rose is a rose

In email correspondence, Isaac Mao told us:

Basically I'd like to take the survey, however, the Chinese name of "blogger" is not correct. So it will cause many confusion to take it...It never use the "Bo Ke" (your translation of "Blogger"). With this name, people even can't distinguish "Blog" and "Blogger" in context.

I'm not convinced yet that the word or concept of blog is fully mainstream, even in America. I just had a conversation with my mother (who is no slouch with the computer) a few days ago trying to explain what a blog is. If you use words like "online diary", people will start to understand what a blog is, yet blogs come in many forms ("diary" implies "personal", which not all blogs are). Sometimes, for those of us not familiar with blogs in other countries, it is not a trivial task trying to find what the de-facto word for blog is.

In the Chinese case, we looked on the Chinese Wikipedia and choose what seemed to be the word for blog, but we were wrong and Isaac graciously pointed out the error, which we corrected.

I asked Isaac if I could talk about our correspondence on my blog, and he gave me the a-okay. Yet, ironically enough, China has blocked access to *.blogspot.com since 1/2003, so he can't even read about himself. Now, I won't get political here and impose the America-is-all-great-democracy-rules view on other countries, but I humbly believe that such a blanket policy of blocking an entire domain name serves little purpose.

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Our current tally is at:

Chinese: 78
Japanese: 47
Korean: 18

Thank you all for your tips and hints on spreading the survey; keep 'em coming. Please ask people to take the survey--tell them its the cool thing to do now and that if you don't take it your friends will mock you for not joining the bandwagon.

Anyone know who the bloggerati (popular bloggers) in Korea and Japan are?